We recently connected with Kristin Turner and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Kristin, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
In 2025 America, we’ve lost the plot. And, not admitting it is keeping us from getting to higher ground. There’s nobody coming to save us. So, how do we go about the business of rebuilding ourselves and the world at the same time?
We’re on the precipice of authoritarianism and, yet, can’t seem to identify what unites us and what exactly we’re affirmatively working towards. The political imagination of our two parties feels both small and suffocating. And while so much of it feels desolate, I believe that we’ve arrived in a moment in our collective evolution that is requiring us to ask bigger questions and name the many elephants in the room. It is hard to strategize without a being anchored to broader, identifiable and shared philosophy of being.
Why don’t we seem to have the language to meet this moment? How is it that so many of us are struggling to find a political home for our humanity? And, why is it that, post-COVID, we’ve refused to name that so much about our inner and outer worlds have changed? It feels like we are spinning our wheels in a hollowness that we’re being told should satiate. We’re going through the motions while everything seems to be on the line.
MisfitMinds is a civic studio and lifestyle collective that sits at the nexus of self-realization and world-building. As a consciousness and agency practice, we are on a mission to reimagine our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the world around us. In this space, “Misfits” explores the relationship between our individual change and our collective imagination in hopes of being able to draw straight lines from building lives we love to building worlds that are worthy of us.
We needed a forum to broach the conversation around who we are both currently and inherently, individually and together. A space where we can, as individuals and as a society, move through the deeply human work and responsibility of asking who we are and deciding who to be.
Misfits is a hub for examining how our interior designs as individual human beings translates into the dynamics of our lived relationships, communities and the world. In short: it’s a pursuit of a lived Civic Spirituality that is informed by the belief that positive societal chance is directly tied to both our evolution and our wellbeing.
Kristin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a seeker, speaker and global citizen who is haunted by questions of how we practice meeting the truth of who we are, together. I explore our collective orientation to Change itself (both personal and societal) and how to identify our personal and collective agency to build anew – moment by moment; relationship by relationship; administration by administration.
My work has always centered on creating more equity, individual agency, and overall well-being in the world – and for giving shape to the conversations that support that. I’m a recovering lawyer who took an initial leap after law school to pursue mission-driven work and have been leaping ever since. Across many high profile roles and industries from tech start ups to progressive presidential campaigns, I encourage others to disavow the suggestion that “the world is flat” and to step into the roundness of lives, professions, and communities that are both fulfilling and of much-needed service.
At not even a year old (!), “Misfits” has a good amount in the works for producing our own slate of content development and offerings. That said, our first priority at Misfits is to first simply create a space to name some of the quiet parts out loud and to build a hub where people who feel similarly can see themselves as a part of a critical mass of soul-forward beings and not merely as isolated citizens yelling into a void.
The truth is: We’re different post-COVID and yet we seem to be reverting back to the smallness of a world that we watched fall apart. In a world that’s disconnected, playing small, and out of time, MisfitMinds is a space to rethink the contours of what WE can do – even if it’s only sometimes within ourselves.
We hope you’ll join us on this adventure! @misfitminds.collective | @theycallherKT
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
The most fundamental lesson I had to learn was how to become my own honest and healthy teammate. So many of us are walking around in “situationships” with ourselves and wondering why we can’t get life to commit to us in the ways we want it to.
I was a 3rd year law student at Harvard Law having what “objectively” seemed like a positive and successful experience, but there was an alarm going off inside of my spirit that somehow knew that – despite not knowing the alternative – that the traditional path of corporate law was not meant for me. I had to learn how to – not only become my own teammate and interrogate my own thoughts, feelings and behaviors – but how to navigate the practical realities of uncertainty, disappointment (and disappointing!) and ultimately what it meant to be a responsible steward of myself as a (now) privileged woman of color.
We so often live our lives on this unending press tour. Doing all that we can to validate our worth to those around us. I fell into an existential crisis trying to answer questions around what my obligations are to myself and to others all the while trying to figure out if I was a crazy person in a sane world or the other way around. (and sometimes both! ha!)
The questions I asked and answered in that time have laid the foundation for a life/experiences far beyond what I could’ve imagined and an emotional maturity that has paid dividends in the noise of what has happened in the world since. Living at the cutting edge of who I know myself to be at any moment has given me ownership over a life that I now feel is uniquely mine.
Success to me, now, is living a life that reflects an understanding of self. Getting as many people to step into empowered imagination and agency feels like my contribution to our social ails.
TLDR: We won’t get out of our collective situation until we start getting out of the situationships we’re in with ourselves. My biggest fear was waking up one day and feeling like I was living someone else’s life. Are you living yours?
Any advice for managing a team?
We are human beings, first. All of us.
Losing sight of that when it comes to our teams is a one-way ticket to perpetuating a lot of harm that inspired us to becoming leaders ourselves in the first place. It, also, in many ways, pulls us as leaders farther away from the truth of who we are individually.
It is literally both inappropriate and inaccurate to call yourself an entrepreneur or a leader while subscribing to the belief that force is the same thing as power. Small and cancerous notions like fear, lack of trust, and too strict hierarchies don’t create the security and space that imagination requires. And, there is NO problem-solving without imagination.
Your strength as a leader is a function of your team. Pick people you trust, admire and want to learn from. Pedigrees be damned. I’m looking for curiosity, compassion, and accountability. Hire for the intangibles, train them on the rote sh*t. Being able to teach and learn go hand-in-hand and everyone in your orbit should have a commitment to doing both – starting with you!
Contact Info:
- Website: MisfitMinds.org | TheyCallHerKT.com
- Instagram: @theycallherKT | @misfitminds.collective
- Linkedin: KristinMMC | MisfitMinds Collective
- Youtube: Misfitminds.Collective
